CES 2012 Preview: Nokia, tablets and 4G LTE

It’s the start of a brand new year and that also means the tech press is gearing up for the annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show next week. It’s going to be a grinding week of new product introductions, struggling to find a strong enough data signal to upload pictures and lost wages at the craps tables but it could also be a great time for the mobile industry. Let’s take a look at what we expect to see from CES 2012.

While it’s going to be an extremely busy week, I expect many mobile companies to wait until February’s Mobile World Congress to unveil many new products. For example, we expect Samsung to roll out its Galaxy S III and the next-generation Galaxy Tab at MWC. That doesn’t mean the smartphone and tablet offerings at CES 2012 will be sparse but the show does cover the entire range of consumer electronics, so things like televisions, computers and even appliances will be featured.

The big story of the show for us may very well center around AT&T and Nokia. We’ve already been invited to Nokia’s press conference at the show and it’s clear that it wants to make a splash with its new Windows Phone lineup. The Lumia 800 and 710 are already out there, so we’re expecting the Lumia 900 (or something similar) with a larger screen, front-facing camera and potentially 4G LTE support.

This will be Microsoft last year as the opening day keynote and it’s already said that we likely won’t see any new announcements from it at that time. Instead, I’d expect it to reiterate what Nokia announced earlier that day, as well as push its upcoming Windows 8 operating system and the Xbox 360.

AT&T has a two-hour event scheduled for the first day of CES and it will likely dive deeper into its 4G LTE plans and perhaps introduce a few more devices. Last year, Vezizon’s aggressive 4G LTE deployment plans were the star of the show in the mobile world but Big Red seems to be focused on “enterprise solutions” this year, so the opportunity is ripe for AT&T to make the case for its 4G network. We’re not expecting too much from Sprint or T-Mobile but Sprint could also use this as a showcase for its move to 4G LTE, although I wouldn’t be surprised if it waited a while.

Huawei wants to make a bigger push into the high-end smartphone space and it has a press conference scheduled for the first day of CES but we’re still hearing that it will wait until Mobile World Congress to really bring out its big guns. I’d say the same could be true for LG, which has multiple other product categories to focus on at the show. We may see Sony try to push its mobile experience now that it’s buying out the Ericsson part of Sony Ericsson but again, I think a February push for that is more in the cards.

The real question is: Will we see a quad-core smartphone at CES 2012? The Tegra 3 chip is already out there in devices like the Transformer Prime and NVIDIA has a big press conference scheduled for CES this could be a nice place to show off a device, even if it doesn’t get released for a few months. I know NVIDIA may also show off its ARM-based Windows 8 stuff too, so it may not want to muddy the message.

Last year was the show where every manufacturer and its brother introduced a tablet and this was headlined by the Motorola Xoom. We know a lot more about what the tablet-buying public wants: mainly iPads or tablets that are feature-packed, cheap and have a full ecosystem. Hopefully, we’ll see some tablets which can stand out from the crowd this year.

Apple will be absent from CES 2012, as usual, but we’ll likely see some cool iOS apps or accessories. After having the best performance at the show last year, we expect CES 2012 to be quite quiet for Motorola, which is still in the process of being acquired by Google. While we have a good idea of what to expect at the show, you never really know what’s going to happen until you hit the ground. We can’t wait to go to CES 2012, so keep it locked on IntoMobile for the latest news.